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Many children’s writers find giving their book a title one of the trickiest parts of the job. It’s an important consideration, though: along with the jacket design and the name of the author, the title of a book is the thing mostly likely to make a potential reader pluck it from the shelf or leave it be. But what strategy works best? Direct or oblique? Short or long?
There is no single answer: both Joan Aiken’s Is and Russell Hoban’s How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen strike me as excellent, though they have little in common. (Aiken’s of course would give a present-day marketing department conniptions, being virtually invisible to search engines, but that’s a different matter.) Back in 1950, when my mother was a humble secretary at Geoffrey Bles, C. S. Lewis sent them a manuscript called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with a note to the effect that this was obviously just a working title - and it was only at Bles’s persuasion that he used it for the published book. History has proved Bles right, but I can see Lewis’s point too: it does look like a working title, once you allow for the beer goggles of hindsight.
Titles have their fashions, like anything else. For example, the big Disney blockbusters of recent years have mostly been past participles: Enchanted, Frozen, Tangled (or “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” as I like to think of them). This snappy style is seen as more in keeping with the busy lifestyles and short attention spans of modern children, but it’s a sobering thought that if Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella had been made today they would have been called Prickedand Slippered.
Around the turn of the millennium there was a vogue in Young Adult fiction for titles that described continuing actions or progressive states, in the form “Verb + ing + Noun”: Gathering Blue, Burning Issy, Missing May and so on. I suppose this was intended to evoke a sense of adolescence as a moving target, a time of change and flux. Any device can be overused, however, and when I wrote Calypso Dreaming (2002) I deliberately reversed the order so as to make my book stand out. How well that strategy worked in terms of sales I leave to historians to record.
If you want to make your own YA title from circa 2000, you can do it by following these simple steps. Turn to page 52 of the book nearest to you and find the first transitive verb; add “ing” to it, and then the name of your first pet. Voilà – there’s your title! (I got Vexing Topsy.)
If you want to make your own YA title from circa 2000, you can do it by following these simple steps. Turn to page 52 of the book nearest to you and find the first transitive verb; add “ing” to it, and then the name of your first pet. Voilà – there’s your title! (I got Vexing Topsy.)
Alternatively, perhaps you wish to produce a prize-winning children’s novel from the sixties or early seventies? In that case it pays to give it a title in the form:
This will confer the air of poignant obliquity so appealing to publishers of that era, home to such books as The Dolphin Crossing, The Owl Service, The Chocolate War and The Peppermint Pig. Naturally the success of this strategy depends a little on one’s choice of words, so to make it easier I invite you to use the chart below, which contains a selection of words approved by our experts as Puffin-friendly. Simply look for the month and day of your birth to find your own title. There are 84 possible combinations, any of which would, I’m sure, have been a shoo-in for the Carnegie shortlist and warmly recommended by Kaye Webb as “a thoughtful novel about growing up that will appeal to slightly older girls.”
“The + Slightly-Quirky-Noun-Used-as-Adjective + Noun”
This will confer the air of poignant obliquity so appealing to publishers of that era, home to such books as The Dolphin Crossing, The Owl Service, The Chocolate War and The Peppermint Pig. Naturally the success of this strategy depends a little on one’s choice of words, so to make it easier I invite you to use the chart below, which contains a selection of words approved by our experts as Puffin-friendly. Simply look for the month and day of your birth to find your own title. There are 84 possible combinations, any of which would, I’m sure, have been a shoo-in for the Carnegie shortlist and warmly recommended by Kaye Webb as “a thoughtful novel about growing up that will appeal to slightly older girls.”
Mine’s The Blue Moon Promise. What’s yours?
0 Comments on Introducing the Amazing, Patented Title Generator - Cathy Butler as of 2/11/2015 3:02:00 AM
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My agent is happy with all of the titles I've come up with so far, so that's good enough for me. The one she liked best was for the novel she advised me to put on the back burner 'until you're established' (long story). Oh the irony!
But yes, titles do matter. They need to be snappy, attention grabbing and memorable. And by gum, they are difficult to come up with...
The main thing, as I tell children in schools, is to get the thing done. Just give it a name, a working title.
The final title can be decided - and altered - afterwards. Besides, one needs to be(politely) aware that the publishers version may not actually be the best or any better than your idea. The name in my most recent novel was made into initials which a) gave away part of the plot and b) confused anyone searching for the book online and c) may have suggested a kind of story that the book definitely wasn't. But, in the end, the publishers were the ones who had bought the m/s so had, with a shrug, to agree.
As Ruth suggests, the wording of a title can easily mislead. Well done with all your books so far, Ruth, and good luck with your Scarefest!
I agree that titles are so important but it is difficult to know what will work well and what will not. I can spend many hours deliberating over them and even when I have settled on one I'm still not sure... sigh... Great post!
Great post!
Titles are so important and having a title suggested by a publisher that you are not happy with with is horrible. It only happened to me once and I hate it.
But then coming up with a good, snappy title that jumps out and accurately pitches the story to a potential reader is really difficult.
I must admit that as a reader I never really bother with the titles that much. I'm more interested in the blurb and, I hate to say it, the front cover. Sometimes I don't even get why the books was named a certain way, even after reading it.
Incidentally, does anyone know why some books get renamed when made into a film? I'm thinking of 'Before I Die' and 'Now is Good' at the moment but I'd like to know - does the different format change how people will see the content? Even if the content itself doesn't change?
Bookahu's comment is interesting. I don't take much notice of book titles either - I rarely remember them. And as a writer, I find them hard. We give them so much thought... I wonder if the average reader doesn't pay them much attention? Be interesting to find out - then maybe we could all stop agonising over them!
Interesting, Ruth. I remember a bookseller commenting that they were sent a list of new books each month by Head Office and they only had the title (and author's name) to intrigue them - so the title was influential and needed to grab the bookseller's attention.
By the way, with my ereader I'm always forgetting the title of the book (and author) because I only see it once at the beginning.